[linux-audio-user] Ardour, Jack, and 2.6 kernels

[Joe Hartley]

On Thu, 27 May 2004 17:16:21 +0000
cv223 at comcast.net wrote:
> Do most people shut off non-essential daemons during recording sessions, or do any other tricks?  This is kinda frustrating, as the CPU load seems rather low (< 15% when the xrun happened).  I guess I'll test out reiserfs and even ext2 to see if the filesystem is the culprit.

I turn off just about everything that's not related to the recording
process, including NTP, xscreensaver and a few other things.  In addition,
I run FluxBox (a lightweight WM) rather than either a GNOME or KDE desktop.

I've also done a lot of work with hdparm to tune the hard drives, and
mount both /tmp and /var/lib/jack/tmp as tmpfs partitions, which helped a
LOT.  Oh, and I use reiserfs on the partitions that I record to.  You
definitely want to use a journaling filesystem for critical data like this,
and though there's quite a bit of debate on which is better for audio
recording, reiserfs has performed like a champ for me.  I haven't had an
xrun during recording for quite a long time now on a 1GHz P3 system with
512MB of RAM, making me a happy guy.

Jan Depner's website at
    http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/ALSA_JACK_ARDOUR.html
is required reading for anyone setting up a Linux-based DAW.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa